


I'll Change That Name With You

by hoc_voluerunt



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexuality, Fluff, Gen, Platonic Cuddling, Post-Case, Post-Reichenbach, however briefly and tangentially touched upon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-29 23:14:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1011236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoc_voluerunt/pseuds/hoc_voluerunt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Sir, my good friend, I'll change that name with you.' (<i>Hamlet</i>, 1.2.163)</p>
<p>Holmes may have no regard for his own health, but friendship still cuts both ways, and emotions may run deep in an intellectual man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Change That Name With You

**Author's Note:**

> Simultaneously a birthday gift to myself, a contribution to the Asexual Awareness Week celebrations, and a humble offering to Basil, who has been so unbearably kind. Apologies for poor canon!fic: churned out in a few hours, and it's been too long since I got properly immersed in the stories, so the voice is probably off...

            I have had occasion, in my dealings with Mr Sherlock Holmes, to experience the dreamlike freedom of a conversation held in the early hours of the morning, well after midnight but before the flush of dawn. After a long and trialling day, and in the engulfing timelessness of the dark, the brain begins to lose itself in fantasies, and too long chasing the threads of a criminal deed and its doer may cause the compulsion to hold one’s tongue to become yet harder and harder to retain.

            We had just tracked a vicious murderer along a winding trail throughout much of London. It was not yet a year after Holmes’ return from his clandestine travels under the guise of his death at the falls of Reichenbach, and still mere months since I had returned to life in Baker Street with him. Our limbs were weary from the days of investigation, and even Holmes’ mind seemed slower than it had been in the midst of the chase and on the tail of a mystery. We shrugged out of our overcoats at the door and only barely got them hanging, before simultaneously trudging to the settee before the glowing remains of the fire and dropping gratefully off our feet.

            “Well Holmes,” I sighed, contemplating my laces and whether or not I had the strength to remove my boots, “I fear Ms Adler may no longer be the only woman to hold a place of pride in your regard.” I smiled at him, mischievous and overtired, and received a half-hearted scowl in response.

            “Despite what you seem to like your readers to believe,” he grumbled, “I am not and never have been monogamously enamoured with that woman.”

            “Ah,” I said in a mock-knowing tone, leaning forward in an attempt to struggle out of my jacket – “so it is to be bigamy for you, Ms Adler, and your new beau Miss Wainwright.”

            Holmes nearly hissed at me, his head lolling against the back of the settee as he sat slumped against the cushions. “She is not my _beau,”_ he complained. “I merely admire the strength of her moral courage in the face of what her erstwhile husband did both to her and to his other victims. She was – _unusually,_ I might add – an undeniable help to the investigation, and as such, I think of her with the respect and dignity that anyone ought to pay to a woman of such extraordinary spirit.”

            I looked at him over my shoulder as I tossed my jacket, heedless, to the floor. “I must say,” I admitted quietly, “that is the kindest thing you have said about anyone – man _or_ woman – in some time.”

            “I am not prone to kindnesses,” he intoned, then opened one eye to peer at me as I sat back again. “Not for anyone who is not my dear and long-suffering housemate, at least.”

            We both tried to laugh, but it was a weak affair, considering our respective, impending states of unconsciousness. I wanted to reach for the brandy, but the sideboard seemed terribly far away across the room, so full of shadows as it was. Beside me, Holmes was clumsily removing his boots, and after a moment his stockinged feet poked at my own shoes, nudging my feet out of the way of his long limbs.

            “Make way, Watson,” he muttered, “you are being singularly selfish in your proximity to the fire.”

            I snorted at him in amusement, but shifted my feet to make room nonetheless. “Perhaps if you hadn’t seen fit to trample half the riverbank, you wouldn’t have need to share the fire so closely.”

            “And if Mr Coleburn hadn’t decided on whiskey rather than ale, we might never have caught him so soon. Do you keep your suppositions to yourself, Watson, they are most tiring.”

            He was lying down, now, settled on his back on a small mound of cushions in the far corner of the settee, with his legs stuck out towards the hearth and his knees jostling with mine. I began, wearily, to remove my cuffs, and summarily failed to feel annoyance at the imposition.

            “Holmes, you cannot sleep there,” I said eventually, as I dropped my cuffs on top of my jacket on the floor and began on my tie and collar.

            “And whyever not?” he rumbled in return, his chin against his chest. “I find it perfectly adequate for the circumstances.”

            I sighed at him in exasperation and no small amount of fondness. “You cannot sleep here fully-clothed as you are.”

            “You would have me strip and scandalise poor Mrs Hudson when she comes up with the breakfast tray?”

            “You know that is not what I meant,” I scowled, but there was little heat in the reprimand.

            “If your fears are that I shall get cold and risk my health, there are always quilts you could fetch for me.”

            “And a nice feather bed with all manner of coverings waiting just in the next room.” I nudged at his bony ankle with my booted toe, but he made no move to respond.

            “I feel absolutely fine where I am, dear doctor,” he eventually mumbled, “but if you fear for the relative warmth of my top and toe, I know the perfect solution.”

            I hummed in question, slumped again in my corner of the seat, and rallied myself to muster the strength to form words. “And what might that be, oh wise detective?”

            With a great huffing and an unexpected, slurred flurry of movement, Holmes raised both body and feet, and swung himself around, falling back so that his head lay on my thigh and his feet dangled over the edge of the settee, lost in shadow. I stared down at his placid, proud face for a moment, resting on my leg with eyes shut for all the world as if he truly intended to sleep there. I could not help but laugh at his nonchalance, though it was subdued somewhat by my exhaustion. Through my own grinning, I could see the lines around his mouth begin to twitch.

            “Now what am I supposed to do?” I argued, breathless with mirth and fatigue. “Sleep here, sitting up?”

            “Certainly,” Holmes said, and if I hadn’t known him as well as I did, I might have mistaken him for a man entirely sincere. As things were, I simply gave an irritable sigh and rested my hand on his breast.

            “You could at least loosen your collar so you don’t choke to death in the night.” It was an attempt at a joke, but my left forefinger tapped against his chest despite the levity.

            “Doctor,” Holmes said, in a lowered, amused tone, “are you trying to undress me?”

            “Yes, if it will help you sleep more comfortably,” I replied, deliberately ignoring his own attempt at humour. “You have been awake for days, it would not be healthy to impede your body’s rest any further.”

            Holmes’ eyes opened suddenly, and he peered at me with suspicious intent. “You are being decidedly gloomy all of a sudden, Watson,” he said. “Have I done something to offend you?”

            I forced my hand to lie flat against his chest, stilling my fingers. “No, Holmes,” I sighed, “not a thing. You merely attempt to sabotage your own health, but that is hardly new behaviour, for you.”

            Holmes snorted. “What is the health of the body compared to the exultation of the brain? Tonight – this entire week, in fact – has been an exercise in intellect: in judgement, mental acuity, deduction and observation. To bring to justice a man like Coleburn is a singularly thrilling experience, and I feel myself quite within my rights to cherish the sensation a little longer.” He shut his eyes with an air of finality.

            I wanted to argue, I truly did – but between Holmes’ imperious nature, his languid expression, and the sheer exhaustion in my voice and limbs, I could not bring myself to stir enough to try to swerve him from a path that he had tread, heedless of my concern, for over a decade.

            A long silence stretched between us, not uncomfortable, but strained somewhat by the growing chill encroaching upon the dying fire, and our own, mutual fatigue. When Holmes finally spoke, it was not with words I could have predicted.

            “I know that you disapprove of my habits, my dear Watson, but I feel it deserves to be said that I do appreciate your efforts. We both know that I should have died a half-dozen times over without you by my side, and for that I thank you; but for your constant chiding, though you know it to be a lost cause, I often wonder what good you see in it. Surely you only irritate me, and frustrate yourself.”

            His eyes remained closed throughout the confession, and though I looked down at him with a worried frown, he did not seem to shift with any sort of emotion. I could not think of a response that he had not heard too often before – and so I tried a different track.

            “You really did not feel any emotion for Miss Wainwright,” I said, only half a question. It managed to surprise Holmes enough that his brow quirked, if not his eyes. I wished he would open them.

            “No,” he said, with some confusion; “aside from the aforementioned admiration. Why, should I have?”

            “She was certainly attractive,” I mused, “in both form and, as you have said, in her strength and virtue. And you felt no love for Irene Adler?”

            “The Woman earned my undying respect with her intelligence,” Holmes sneered. “Nothing so base as _love_ entered the picture.”

            I sighed, long and low, and tried again. “Could you not use your brain for just a moment, and _imagine_ what it might be like to love a woman so much you might take her as a wife – and then to find her wasting away in front of you? It is hardly a comforting sight, I can assure you, and once was quite enough for me.”

            Holmes’ eyes shot open, and his aquiline face creased into a curiously childlike frown. “Are you comparing me to your late wife?” he asked in astonishment, and I groaned, rolling my eyes and regretting the example.

            “Ignore the implications, I apologise,” I said. “But _please,_ do try to understand me when I feel concerned for you. If _you_ will not do it, then I am certainly obliged. Think of if one of your Irregulars fell ill, and you had to care for him. What then?”

            “My Irregulars fall ill all the time, Watson, surely you haven’t forgotten the conditions in which they live. But –” He pushed himself up on his hands, my palm dropping from his chest as he sat up and turned to face me on the settee. “Surely you can just ask me to think of you?”

            My left hand still hovered somewhere above the cushions, and I frowned at him, confused. “I beg your pardon?”

            “You are trying to incite me to a sympathetic understanding of your concern for my health,” Holmes explained with exasperation. “Surely you can just ask me to consider my hypothetical distress should you yourself fall ill? After all, we share the same bonds of friendship, do we not? Of companionship in home and partnership in business? Why do you not simply ask me to consider yourself?”

            His confusion seemed so genuine that I might have laughed: the very idea that Sherlock Holmes was baffled by the man he spent the most time with.

            “I would not be so presumptuous,” I finally said, “as to assume knowledge of your exact emotions towards me.”

            “Is there something else, then, other than friendship, which you feel?”

            I sighed, and squirmed in my seat. “No, of course not,” I answered honestly, “but you cannot deny that my regard for you seems sometimes to be on quite a different level to yours.”

            He stared at me for a very long moment, before a long breath left his lungs, along with the words: “Oh, Watson, you dear, utter idiot…” He laughed, low and wistful in his exhaustion, and fell forward to lean his head against my shoulder. “The Almighty knows I should like nothing to do with a world without you,” he said in a soft voice, muffled by my sleeve. “I tested the hypothesis for three years, did I not? And where did I end up after that?” He raised his head to look me in the eye, and I smiled ruefully at his utterly emotional expression.

            “We ended up right where we are, Holmes.”

            He nodded at me, firm and unquestionable, and rested his head against my shoulder once more, tucking himself into my side. “Now, let’s have no more nonsense about my regard for you being on a different level to yours. You are my closest, most enduring friend, and I hope for things to remain like that for quite some time, should the good Lord be willing; and I shall not hear a word more on the matter.”

            I raised my arm to wrap around his shoulders, and pulled him closer to my side, smiling again. Behind the grate, the last of the embers were dying out, and there was a decided greyness to the light outside the windows.

            “You still need to rest,” I said, but Holmes only replied, in a muffled, impertinent voice: “I _am_ resting. If my pillow would just be a little quieter, I might be more successful in my endeavours. And besides, I couldn’t possibly go to my room now – I’m afraid my cheek has become quite attached to this curious weave of brown wool of yours, and there is no longer any chance of parting the two.”

            With a puff of amusement and exasperation, I shrugged him from my shoulder and pushed to my feet, unbuttoning my waistcoat with as little fumbling as I could manage.

            “Watson –” Holmes started in protest. “No, Watson – what are you –”

            He broke off when I tossed the waistcoat at him, where it hit him squarely in the face and landed in his dumbstruck lap. Gripping him by the shoulders, I pulled him up from the settee and, though I swayed a little from the sudden exertion, prodded him in the direction of his bedroom.

            “There now, your cheek has its beloved brown wool, and you are even on your feet,” I instructed, the gravity in my voice undermined by the smile on my lips. “Now _go to bed.”_

            I marched, as steadily as I could, out into the hall and up the stairs to my own room, while behind me, Holmes’ low and commanding voice let out an affectionate few words.

            “Right you are, my dear Watson,” he said as I left, my waistcoat still held in his loose fingers as he made his way to his room. “Let us get some rest…”


End file.
